EDUCATING Rita actress Julie Walters, a life-long Labour Party supporter, says she has become totally fed up with politicians of all persuasions.

"I have supported the Labour Party in the past, but I feel incredibly disillusioned and let down by Tony Blair in particular, since he took us into a war which has cost so many lives on a lie," she said.

"Politicians are slippery, evasive, irresponsible liars in the main," says Ms Walters, adding that she would not vote for any of them at the forthcoming General Election.

In two short sentences, Ms Walters summed up the mood of many who simply do not trust politicians to represent them.

From the great expense scandal to the Chilcot Inquiry, we see manipulation, evasion, cover-up and coercion. If the law of the land doesn’t suit, they bend it until it does.

Take, for instance, the pledge to be more ‘transparent’. How does that sit with the fact that none of the three major parties admitted the wholesale abuse of expenses until the story hit the press?

How about Mr Blair’s admonishment of his advisers for expressing in writing their opinion that the invasion of Iraq was illegal, or the 70-year ban on disclosing the details of Dr Kelly’s mysterious death? Where’s the ‘transparency’ there?

Public disillusionment is with the entire political process, which they feel powerless to influence. Promised referendums are denied and public consultations manipulated to give the prescribed result. The term used by Eurocrats is ‘post-democratic era’, where public opinion is surplus to requirements.

Ask yourself this question: How did we go from an independent self-governing nation to having our courts and policies controlled from Brussels? Did you vote for that? That’s the ‘post-democratic era’ at work.

Unless we have an Independent candidate who will not be coerced, pressured and manipulated, and whose word we can actually trust, I shall be joining Ms Walters.

As she so clearly states: "Politicians are slippery, evasive, irresponsible liars in the main."

The views on this page are Vic Barlow's and not necessarily those of the Express